Why e-books are neat

Elizabeth Henry, E-Resources/Instruction & Reference Librarian

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The nice thing about e-books is that you can access them anytime, anywhere, as long as you have an Internet connection and a laptop, computer, or iPad. For example, suppose you’re frantically trying to complete an assignment at 3:00 AM that’s due at 9:00 AM and you realize you need just one more source, but alas, the Library’s closed. That’s when the Library’s e-books can come in handy—they’re online, ready to be discovered and used by you for your assignment!

If you’re wondering how many e-books the Library has, my honest answer is: I don’t know. Why? Because there are so many e-books that I lost count and gave up trying to keep track of it. The reason for the incredibly huge amount of e-books is because we both subscribe to, and purchase from four – yes, four – different companies. Each company provides a place online, known as platforms, for us to read the e-books. The platform and how you can interact with the e-book will vary, but they all are essentially the same: books in electronic format and available online via the Library’s catalog. Our e-book platforms are:

• eBook Collection, owned by EBSCO
• Ebrary
• PsycBooks (the platform is provided by Ovid)
• Safari Books Online, owned by ProQuest

They all will have different appearances and features, but there are some common features that all e-book platforms have, which are:

• A table of contents (TOC) that you can click on to jump from one chapter to the next
  
• The ability to search within the e-book for specific words
  
• Being able to zoom in or out of the page so you can read the text easily
  
• The option to print a limited number of pages.
  
• Searchability within the full text of an e-book.

Two of the features I mentioned, the table of contents, and the ability to search within the book for specific words, can be handy by helping you save time on looking through a book to determine if it has information you need or not. For example, I want to find more information about John F. Kennedy, and I find a e-book titled Presidential Party Building : Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush, which looks promising but does it have information specifically about John F. Kennedy? By clicking on the link for the e-book and opening it up, I look at the table of contents, and -voila- there’s John F. Kennedy. But wait, what if John F. Kennedy is mentioned more than once outside of the chapter? Then I type into the search box, “John F. Kennedy,” and a list appears, indicating where I can find further information about John F. Kennedy. Nifty, huh?

So you must be thinking, Perfect! Now all I have to do is find the book I want, and then download it onto my Kindle or iPad! Right? Well, I honestly wish I could say, “Yup! Go ahead and download it!” but unfortunately, no, the majority of the e-books we have (as in about 98%) are offered through platforms that aren’t able to make the e-books downloadable. The only exception is EBL, a platform we’re working on getting up and running right now.

However, in some hot-off-the-presses news, we just learned that Ebrary will allow us to be able to download e-books onto Kindles, Nooks, and iPads! So once we figure out how to do that, we’ll have the download option up and running. Stay tuned for updates.

If you have any further questions about e-books here at the Library, please do not hesitate to contact me via e-mail.

Happy reading!

Children's books!

Hmm. A little more than two weeks since my last post. This ain't good.

Truth is, I've been so busy juggling various duties in addition to the usual behind-the-scenes work that I haven't been able to devote time to the blog or vlogging book reviews.

I had been planning for a while to bring my colleagues in on this -- Patrick and Sarah's ALA reports from July started it -- and figured now was a great time for it.

We're kicking off with a great post about our children's books from Laura Jacobi!

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One of the pleasures of being responsible for the Education collection is buying books to support the Children’s Literature curriculum. They’re short, so you can actually read them! And they’re often really cute. Here are three winners:

Being a traditionalist, I was prepared to turn my nose up at Rubia and the Three Osos by Susan Middleton Elya and illustrated by Melissa Sweet. How could anyone improve on Goldilocks and the Three Bears? But this is such a jaunty, lighthearted, little bilingual girl:

Little Miss Rubia, curls made of oro.
“A tiny casita, for me? ¡La adoro!”

And the end has a charming twist in which Rubia departs from the selfish toad character of Goldilocks. You’ll love it!

April and Esme, Tooth Fairies by Bob Graham recounts the adventures of two kid fairies on their first foray through modern England. They fly through the night skies, into Daniel’s house and to his bedroom. Oh, no! Daniel has put his tooth in a glass of water, just as Grandma does with her teeth! Then he wakes up! What to do? Text Mommy Fairy for help! Once the mission’s accomplished, will they avoid the temptation of taking Grandma’s teeth too? Find out!

If you don’t have your own, borrow a first or second grader and read We are in a Book by Mo Willems. Piggie the pig and Gerald the elephant (who contradicts everything you’ve read about pachyderm intelligence) sense someone looking at them and realize, “A reader is reading us!” They then have barrels of laughs making the reader say words -- until the book ends. Totally silly.

You can find these and lots of other picture books in the Library General Stacks in the number 800. Don’t let the Children’s Lit. students have all the fun.

Robbing the bees

Our September in the Stacks series of events and raffle are over. We’ve already announced the winners with some photos on our Facebook page; there are some big grins there!

Now: No vlog this week. I just finally had my computer upgraded to Windows 7 like the rest of campus -- it’s a long story that can mostly be chalked up to my own sentimentality for XP -- and the software I usually use to edit vlogs still needs to be reinstalled. That’s on my list!

In the meantime, I thought I’d actually write a book review for a change. Here goes. I hope my writin’ muscles haven’t atrophied too much by now.

The book I’m going to review: Robbing the Bees by Holley Bishop.

I’m going to cop to something that a lot of people find weird for some reason: I love bees. They’re really cool animals. Not only do they make honey and sting stuff, but they also are responsible for making sure that a lot of the plants we eat on a daily basis -- from oranges to almonds -- manage to grow and produce the fruits and nuts that we all enjoy so much.

As Bishop notes in the book, I’m not the only one who thinks they’re cool; an old guy called Smiley down in the Florida Panhandle loves them. He loves them enough to have tens of thousands of them working for him, collecting pollen and nectar from various local plants ranging from watermelon to the rare, expensive, and difficult-to-get tupelo.

Although a lot of the book tells Smiley’s story, it’s really about the history of the partnership that’s existed between humans and bees for thousands of years. It offers an overview of different kinds of beekeeping techniques, some of which are still in use today after hundreds of years, and how this partnership’s evolved from chancing across the odd hive with its trove of honey in a cave or hollow tree to a multibillion-dollar industry that hums along behind our supermarket shelves.

Bishop’s style is kind of interesting; when she talks about Smiley, her tone turns kind of wry, as though she’s trying to tell a funny story without laughing. He’s a funny guy, definitely a down-home fella, and he reminds me of a few people I grew up with, a little rough around the edges, but a big old sweetheart who’s somewhat crazy.

But when she turns to the bigger picture of beekeeping history, things get a little academic. I found myself wishing every so often that she’d return to the Panhandle and the travails of harvesting tupelo nectar, which only becomes available for a two-to-three-week period in the spring. Then it turns funny again when she talks about her own experiences as an amateur beekeeper, even when she accidentally kills her first hive after a long winter. It’s a sad moment that kind of drives home the strange contrast between how important bees are to us in general, but relatively expendable as far as a particular individual or hive are concerned.

On the whole, I really dug this book! Although it focuses on our relationship with bees and how their everyday lives have become a major part of ours -- often without our realizing it -- it led me to think a little more about the mutualistic relationships our species enjoys with others, like dogs, horses, or cats.

In an oddly serendipitous incident, right when I was in the middle of this book, a friend invited me to a beekeeping workshop right here in Washington, DC! I know it sounds odd, but there are many small gardens and “farms” all over the place; this one was associated with a library and community center just a few blocks from Gallaudet.

It was pretty fascinating; a group of us stood around the hive and watched as the local beekeeper opened it up and pulled out a frame with its honeycomb and put it in a glass box for us to examine more closely. I remember most strongly seeing a young girl, a local who was involved with the center and the farm, standing right next to the hive. She was at the center of a cloud of bees, a scene that would drive most people I know into a flailing frenzy, but was completely at ease. The next generation!

Of course, the honey with brie on crusty bread that we had afterwards didn’t hurt, either. Good times.